Working with Bad Organizational Colors
July 17th, 2007
My first professional website. I was so excited, I had worked so hard to position myself within my department for it. Then I realized, I had to work with our official color: orange. Not a nice warm earth tone, or a bright energizing version either. But what I'm pretty sure is the ugliest web-safe color to be found. Dark, dreary and muddy- not the image we wanted to present to our users.
Worse, the secondary color was a web-safe green that just made the orange that much worse.
Since then, I've found that there are a number of strategies that can be used for dealing with less than ideal colors, unfortunately most of them weren't available to me on that project.
- Use it sparingly. This is what we did. A mostly black, white and grey design with punches of orange and little to no green. It worked, but it lacked warmth, energy, and a cohesion with the rest of the organization.
- Use a complimentary/analogous color. The colors surrounding the offending one can effect how it comes across. There are about a gazillion color tools and guides out there. Pick a link and take a spin. Unfortunately, as a mere department, we were stuck with official rules which stated only those colors.
- Use a similar but not as aweful shade. Most people may not even notice but they'll feel the difference and your statistics will thank you. This is the optimum option because it allows you to keep the full organizational branding while easing away from the ickyness. See color tools for help in finding that perfect double. I think we could have gotten away with this but the committee disagreed.
Tuesday, July 17th, 2007 at 11:58 am and is filed under Design.
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